In short – Hong Kong was great! A vibrant city with an interesting mix of East and West, at least if you live on Kowloon rather than the island. We stayed at Langham Place which was excellent.
For being a world city with international corporate presence, the general internet awareness seemed to be surprisingly low. Very few sites were advertised or communicated in other ways. Surprising for me, but it just goes to show that it’s very easy to get blinded by your home market.
I picked up on a few sites though, and thought I’d share them with you below.
AliBaba.com
Alibaba.com claims to be the world’s largest B2B marketplace and is also the site that controls Yahoo China. They have over 3 million registered users from over 200 countries apparently. I had completely missed this site earlier, but it was advertised on every taxi in down town HK. They also own TaoBao which is the largest consumer-to-consumer site in China.
AirAsia.com
Budget airline planning to start cheap London-Kuala Lumpur flights soon. Good connections within Asia. Other low fare airlines I noticed were Jetstar.com, Tiger Airways and Viva Macau.
Danwei
A good tip that I got from Jan Hökerberg at Bamboo. An English site about “Chinese media, advertising, and urban life”. Provides good insight to this interesting and emerging market.
Netvigator.com
The most common email suffix in all the classifieds. Seems to be a local broadband operator.
Qihoo.com
A Chinese forum content aggregator. Recently lost a law suit against Yahoo China through installing software that claimed that Yahoos toolbar was malware.
Xunlei.cn
Chinese video download service that got funding from Google while I was there. According to SCMP, the site has 100 million registered users and gains 400 000 new every day. Sounds a bit steep to me.
Baidu.com
Last but not least. You can’t talk about Chinese internet sites and not mention Baidu.com. I saw figures from iResearch that credited Baidu.com to 63,7% of the Chinese search market while Google only had 19,2%.
By the way, flying to Hong Kong has never been as cheap as now. Check out Oasis Hong Kong Airlines for a low fare flight in an ex-Singapore Airlines aircraft.
(If you like these sorts of posts, here are a few sites from England and some (Swedish) thoughts on Estonia here and here.)
tags bloggar.se: alibaba.com, jetstar.com, tiger airways, viva macau, bamboo, qihoo, qihoo.com, xunlei, xunlei.com, baidu.com, oasis hong kong, langham place Ping Intressant.se